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Grammaticalization and Semantic Reanalysis Regine Eckardt [email protected]

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Grammaticalization and Semantic Reanalysis Regine Eckardt Regine.Eckardt@Phil.Uni-Goettingen.De Grammaticalization and Semantic Reanalysis Regine Eckardt [email protected] 1. Grammaticalization as a conspiracy of changes Research in grammaticalization was inspired by the question “where does grammar come from?”. While it is almost tautological that any communication system requires signals for entities, properties, relations (“content words”), grammatical structures don’t seem to be required by signalling systems as such. Nevertheless, practically all natural languages include grammatical structure of surprising complexity. Moreover, there is no correlation between the level of cultural achievements of a society and the level of grammatical complexity of the society’s language. These observations suggest that our universal linguistic abilities drive us to collectively enrich signalling systems of content words with grammatical infrastructure. The present article takes a closer look into the semantic processes involved in these developments. The prototypical instance of language change called ‘grammaticalization’ is a change where a word with independent content, preferably of one of the main lexical categories A, V or N, develops a new use with a comparatively more dependent, more abstract content, changed word class, typically of a functional nature, e.g. auxiliary, modal, functional word or even affix. The development of Latin and French future tense forms is often presented as a typical model case of grammaticalization. (1) Expression of Future tense: we will sing Pre-Latin Latin French *kanta bhumos → canta-bimus sing be-2Pl.pres. sing-2Pl.fut. cantare habemus → chante-rons sing have-2Pl.pres. sing-2Pl.fut. allons chanter → ? go-2Pl.pres sing The semantic link between main verb (‘sing’) and embedding/auxiliary verb (‘have’, later ‘go’) changes during the development. The grammatical status of the latter verb changes (from embedder to auxiliary verb), later also its morphological status (from independent word to affix). While it is usually a larger part of sentences which undergoes restructuring in such developments, it is often possible to spot one participant which is most involved, in the present case the verb ‘have’ which turns from embedding verb via auxiliary to inflectional affix. ‘Grammaticalization’ is often used as if it affected exactly one word, clitic, or syllable. I will frequently talk about items as a cover term for ‘construction’, ‘word’, ‘clitic’, ‘affix’; firstly because grammaticalization processes are assumed to affect all these parts of speech, and secondly because changes can turn for instance a ‘word’ into an ‘affix’, still the object will remain an ‘item’. The first studies in grammaticalization concerned the origin of grammatical structures like case endings, tense and aspect systems, determiners or classifiers. As the field broadened its focus, the need arose to replace the intuitive characterization of an item changing from “something less grammatical” into “something more grammatical” by a more specific characterization. One of the most sophisticated models, and one that is still in use (e.g. Fischer, 2007) was developed by Lehmann in (1982/1995). Lehmann proposes three parameters of grammaticalization, each being realised in a syntagmatic and a paradigmatic dimension. The following table of criteria emerges (Lehmann 1982/1995: T4): paradigmatic syntagmatic weight integrity structural scope cohesion paradigmaticity bondedness variability paradigmatic syntagmatic variability variability Grammaticalization, according to Lehmann, is characterised by an increase in cohesion along with a decrease in weight and variability from older item to newer item. The system is to be read as a cluster of correlated features rather than a list of necessary and sufficient criteria. Cases of grammaticalization should show sufficiently many, but need not exhibit all of the listed tendencies. The paradigmatic weight of a sign, or its integrity, measures its distinctness and independence of other signs both in terms of phonology and semantics. Hence both phonological reduction and semantic generalization (see below on bleaching) constitute a loss in integrity, according to Lehmann. The paradigmaticity of a sign reflects the degree to which it functions as part of a paradigm of signs of complementary distribution in certain contexts. Grammaticalization frequently involves a trend for an item to turn into part of a paradigm of fixed semantic and structural function. Paradigmatic variability, finally, concerns the question whether an item can be freely replaced by other signs of the same paradigm, or be left out altogether. A loss in paradigmatic variability means an increase in obligatoriness of a sign in certain contexts. The syntagmatic weight of a sign, according to Lehmann, is its structural scope. He discusses various examples where either as semantic scope or syntactic scope is at stake, the prime cases being former independent items that turn into affixes or clitics. The criterion of reduced scope is however easily challenged by all those cases where content words develop into propositional operators (most prominently the modal verbs in English), and observation that was taken up in Tabor and Traugott (1998). Syntagmatic bondedness measures the degree to which an item is dependent on the presence of other signs, or attaches to them in a morpophonologically significant manner. Syntagmatic variability, finally, reflects the degree to which an item has to hold a fixed position or can be freely moved around in the clause. Lehmann demonstrates that typical traditional case studies in grammaticalization show the predicted kind of shifts in at least some, sometimes most of the given parameters. He suggests that an instance of change should be called grammaticalization exactly if it shows enough of increased cohesion or decreased weight and variability, syntagmatically or paradigmatically. A synopsis of known patterns of change revealed several typological near-universals of grammaticalization. Perhaps the most prominent and controversial is the unidirectionality hypothesis, the observation that the changes at stake tend to adhere to one direction. There are no known cases of inflexion affixes developing into content words, of tense forms being reinstalled as full verbs etc. The universal trends are often summarized in so-called clines, a small number of attested possible roads through the major grammatical categories, like the following: (2) content word > function word > clitic > affix > ø verb > preposition > affix > ø Another observation concerned the fact that even at a more fine-grained level, similar or identical developments can be found repeatedly in different languages. Many languages, for instance, posses future tense forms that are based on a verb of volition/desire (type will future), future tenses that rest on the verb to go, complementizers based on deictics or the verb say, prepositions that derive from nouns for back and front etc. A very inspiring survey of attested pathways of grammaticalization was compiled by Heine and Kuteva (2002). Observations like these suggested that grammaticalization was an independent mode of language change, subject to its own laws and generalizations, a linguistic process that is driven by autonomous rules that deserve investigation. The main problem in these investigations turned out to be that no given instance of language change carries the label “grammaticalization” on its sleeve. Hence if some instance of change looked similar to other cases of grammaticalization but contradicted some universal, it never was clear whether this meant that the universal was falisified, or that the change had not been an instance of grammaticalization in the first place. The emergence of discourse adverbials and other sentence level operators offers a typical battlefield in this debate. We know a wide range of pragmatic and logical markers which derive from content words, often along universal pathways. For instance, the complementizer while as well as German weil (‘because’) both derive from the noun weile (‘time’) used as a free genetive (der WeileGEN = ‘at that time’, see König+Traugott 1988, Traugott+König 1991). In terms of semantic development, we see a move from an independent concept to an abstract temporal or causal relation. The scope of the item, however, clearly increases in the development, and its status with respect to paradigmaticity is somewhat unclear—after all, there is no grammatical requirement to use temporal or causal subordinate clauses. Similarly, the content adjective butan (‘outside’) develops into the contrastive conjunction but (Merin 2003), and the prepositional phrase in dede (‘in action’, ‘in what people do’) turns into the discourse marker indeed (data see OED). Proximative particles like German fast (‘almost’), which developed from the adjective fast = ‘immovable, solid’ (like the English adjective fast = ‘speedy’) are hardly parts of the core grammatical system. Likewise, the adjective even/eben (≈ ‘flat’, ‘smooth’) in English and German developed uses as a scalar particle (English) and modal particle in German, where it serves to add a consoling undertone to the assertion: (3) Peter ist ein Junggeselle. (‘Peter is a bachelor’; neutral statement) Peter ist eben ein Junggeselle (‘Peter is a bachelor, you can’t help it’; justifying or excusingly) Such cases are easy to find and occur in considerable numbers (Abraham 1991, Brinton 1996, Mosegaard Hanson+al. 2005 among others). What they share with other instances of grammaticalization
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